All photos courtesy of REDCAT. Credit: Rafael Hernandez.
The work of performance artist Kristina Wong simultaneously tackles issues of social media obsession, globalization in conversation with personal narrative, anti-imperialist anti-racist travels to Uganda, and what happens when one self-declared Asian-American performance artist somehow becomes a Ugandan rap star. This all sounds promising and totally hilarious, but what went down wasn’t exactly triumphant. Wong’s sharp wit and intellect definitely left an impression on audiences, but ultimately the over-the-top nature of this humor at times went so hard so over-the-top that it just felt ironically grandiose. This show is as American as possible.
Wong begins by discussing the ways that she is not Apple, Google, the Wall Street Journal, or any other type of American global corporation. She seems slightly resentful about this, but it’s part of the critique. From there, Wong presents various charts on large-sized paper that are made of felt fabric, in a gesture of what real “handmade” products look like. All of the charts show her current interest in social media marketing, clickbait techniques that prey on your emotions, and how she spends way too much time in front of the computer basically yelling at herself for being unable to leave. Wong is trying to figure out how she can “leave her legacy” beyond just posting a lot to Facebook and Twitter, using many many hashtags, and making genuinely funny jokes about this.
She also discusses white privilege and the things that, as a third-generation Chinese-American, she gets questioned about all the time, which are lame to have to constantly deal with. Things like – “Where are you from originally?” which is the worst question ever to ask a person of color.
Things start to get weird when the story turns back to Wong, and what the heck she is doing. Wong’s heightened version of herself, partially a playback through social media, at times feels very distant regardless of the audience member’s race, class, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, or any other marker of identity.
She explains to the audience that she doesn’t have enough money to really do anything, and at another point mentions how she’s still sleeping on a futon into her 30s, but nonetheless she decides to spend $2K that she doesn’t have on a trip to Uganda, where she’ll work with refugees and help . . . but in a way that is not “American do-Gooder-y.” From there we go on a journey with her to Northern Uganda, where most of the show’s narrative takes place. In her time spent there, she randomly befriends the number one hip-hop producer of Uganda, records a record with him, and stays in touch via Facebook, as we do these days.
Wong combines tactile props, like her felt-fabric charts, to give audiences a visual landscape of her travels, and also uses actual photos she shot during the trip, showing them on her iPad. What wasn’t quite clear about this storyline, however, was Wong’s true purpose. She started it off with a question she kept repeating to herself: “How can I leave a legacy beyond my incessant tweeting, Facebooking and hashtagging of political statements?” Yet with her focus on her own legacy and hyper-focus on her identity as a third-generation Asian-American performance artist who is all about fighting the gender binary, racism, sexism, classism, and any other “-ism” that exploits people of color, low-income, non-cisgender — basically anyone who isn’t the white hetero patriarchy — her vibe starts to feel redundant and self-centered even though her mission is meant to be transformative.
More interesting though is that during her journey to Africa she basically realizes that she has a version of white privilege while there, even though she is an Asian-American and read as “Asian”. She is also given all the privileges one would expect of an American visitor to Uganda.
Everything about Wong’s intersectional feminism, anti-imperialism, and social justice agenda is on point, but the revelations she makes throughout this show are pretty obvious. We are left wondering if she could have had the same revelations without spending money she didn’t have to go somewhere that didn’t know what to do with her. Nevertheless, Wong demonstrates an inspiring level of honesty about her personal and political life.
